


Quicksilver

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 21:22:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1662905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Bering-and-Wells fiction collage. Not short, but not incredibly long; mostly G-rated. It assumes knowledge of the show through 4.17. Not a fix-it… more a “how things maybe are, and how they maybe were, all of which might begin to suggest how they maybe will be.” Posted on tumblr in September 2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quicksilver

Myka’s tenth-grade chemistry teacher, in the course of a lecture on the periodic table, had removed a vial of mercury from a shelf near his desk. “Atomic number eighty; look up the chemical symbol, which, yes, will be on the test,” he’d said, holding it up for the class to see. “Very interesting properties.”  Then he put it back in place and declared, “Also, quite dangerous. Off limits.” But early one morning, with the halls outside the classroom just beginning to fill but the seats at the lab benches empty, Myka had been drawn to that stoppered container, unable to keep herself from picking it up, tilting it, watching the silver flow break into beads that moved unlike any liquid she had ever seen.

“Please, don’t be startled,” her teacher had said softly when he’d found her with her hands on the vial; as Myka moved guiltily and quickly, too quickly, to set it down and apologize, he’d gone on, “No, I mean it quite literally: _please_ , if you intend to handle mercury, you would do well not to be easily startled. It’s a hazardous substance, particularly when concentrated. You don’t want to let that loose.” His voice was almost shaking. The next morning, the vial was gone.

Myka had believed him then, in the most pedestrian of ways, but these days she believes him in a grand, sweeping, metaphorical way that is infinitely worse. A voice that sounds suspiciously like her sister’s will every now and then rush through her head: “Only you, _Myka_ , would fall for an _element_ from the _periodic table_.” Myka’s idea of a funny joke, in chemistry class, had involved a lead-and-jelly sandwich. Her younger self makes her cringe. Her older self makes her cringe harder.

It accumulates in the body, mercury does, building up over time, a stronger and stronger poison. Myka can certainly feel the truth of that.  
  
****  
In defiance of everything Myka thinks she has known about her musical taste thus far in her life, all she has wanted to hear, since her diagnosis, is rap. She is distracted by the sputtering smoothness of it, the way its rhythm is always accompanied by an undercurrent of anger that threatens to fire its way through; its violently beating heart matches her body and the emotional state it houses.  
  
“You cannot be serious,” Pete says when she asks him to find some rap on the SUV’s satellite radio. He tries a joke: “Are you sure it’s actually cancer, and not some body-snatching alien?”  
  
Myka tries to laugh in response, but it _is_ a body-snatching alien, so it isn’t funny. If everyone could just stop _trying_ , but she can’t tell them not to try, because then they’ll aggressively _not_ try.  She sighs, “Just… could you just do this?” She wants to hear a voice wash over her, through her, and all the voices she knows well are all wrong now. She needs to hear how to get from one verse to the next. She needs propulsion.  
  
She had handed her iPod to Claudia. “Just put somebody’s hundred best list on there. Eighties, nineties, whatever, all of it.” Claudia, to her credit, had done it, with no jokes or questions. So Myka is continually surprised by what she hears, by what circles back around. She likes the way the philosophy tumbles so casually by—it’s like that, and that’s the way it is. She talks back to Jay Z; she has 99 problems and a bitch is _certainly_ one, hit me. Claudia has given her some clean versions, but she prefers the unexpurgated. Clean versions remind her of early days in the Secret Service, when her security clearance was low: “I know I’m a liar if she ever tries to [REDACTED] leave again I’m’a tie her to the bed and set this house on fire.” The dropping of words disrupts her immersion. She is sure her clearance must be high enough now to put what is missing back where it belongs.  
  
****  
Helena is sick. No one is surprised by this, except Helena; she’s been debronzed only for a few months, back at the Warehouse for a grand total of two weeks, and it’s obvious that her body is encountering new germs at a blinding rate of speed. Her immune system is evidently strong, bizarrely so, because this is the first time she’s actually been ill, if Helena herself is to be believed. “Ill” is a tiny word, though, one that doesn’t really apply to what’s going on here; “sick” is closer, but it’s small too. She’s worse than that. She’s _sick_ sick. That’s the phrase Claudia used when she saw Helena’s face at the breakfast table, that first flu-ridden morning, and Myka’s been using it in her head for two days now. _Sick_ sick.  
  
She’s so very _sick_ sick, in fact, that she can barely stay awake most of the time. Which is why Myka’s sitting on the living-room sofa with Helena’s head in her lap: they had been talking about an artifact that Helena had retrieved, decades ago, for Warehouse 12, and Myka had been speculating about its properties, and Helena’s head had just… drooped. Onto Myka’s shoulder first, but that hadn’t been very comfortable for Myka, as Helena’s chin was much pointier than expected. So Myka let Helena’s upper body slide down, like the most embarrassingly arousing of all dead weights, until her temple lay against Myka’s thigh.  
  
Now Myka is stuck. Helena’s face is turned outward, toward the room, and all Myka can see is her hair—that glorious, amazing hair. Myka has itched to touch that hair since the first time she saw it unbound; it seems impossible, particularly to someone with hair that has been rudely called “crazy” by more than one person, that such smooth richness could exist.  
  
Myka reaches one hand down, only to jerk it back when Helena shifts a little. But she doesn’t move again, so Myka stealthily lowers her fingers a second time. And she touches that hair, just barely sensing it at first, then weaving through, lifting strands and letting them run down to nestle against Helena’s face.  
  
She means to remove her hand, she really does. But she can’t stop; she watches and _feels_ those locks pour through her fingers over and over again.  
  
“…comforting,” Helena breathes, and Myka freezes.

  
****  
The bullet hits the newly minted Agent Bering in the lower thigh, near her knee—not solidly; it doesn’t take her down. It does more than graze, however, and she stumbles, slows, her pursuit of the shooter clearly ended. Where is my backup? she wonders, almost idly. She could have sworn those two guys were right behind her, but she’s decelerating, stopping, in the dusk of a now-empty alley. Seconds ago, the shooter scaled the chain-link fence blocking the end of it. She squints in the gloom, considering whether she has any energy left for one last burst. She tests her leg and it buckles.  
  
She’s lying on the ground. She hadn’t looked at the wound before, but now she does. It’s… interesting. There’s a too-neat hole in her leg from which blood wells. It seems to start moving faster as she stares, but she’s never been shot before, and she thought she was going to be the invincible secret service agent, so maybe that’s what blood does when you discover you’re vincible… no, it’s supposed to slow down, to… she couldn’t push up and over the fence, but she knows she can push through this haze. She grabs for something to think about, to hold her steady while everything threatens to sweep away, and as she’s ripping her shirt to make a tourniquet, as she’s using her teeth to yank it tight around her upper thigh, her only distinct thought is a rhythmic chant on repeat: “Shouldn’t have quit pre-med, why’d I quit pre-med, only idiots quit pre-med….”  
  
  
****  
Myka went through a pen-and-ink phase when she was thirteen. (Myka was always going through phases.) She had multiple colors of ink, a fountain pen with a feed that could accept multiple nibs, and two antique inkwells. The inkwells had started it all: her father had bought several lots of books at an estate auction, and it fell to Myka to unpack and begin cataloguing the finds. Wedged tightly between volumes of Cicero, wrapped in so much newspaper they looked like tennis balls, were two small glass inkwells. She showed them to her father and asked if she could have them. He shrugged and said, “We’re not getting into the calligraphy business.”  
  
Myka turned away and whispered, “Well, maybe I am.”  
  
She wrote her essays for her English class with that pen, dipping it into those receptacles, swirling her words onto the page with a flamboyance that her spoken language lacked. The way the ink, the black ink especially, spilled from the pen led her to keep writing, to say more, to go on generating ideas.  
  
One inkwell had survived her adolescence, the other smashed in a fit of rage, or clumsiness, or some other embarrassing episode she refused to remember. She had to keep refusing the memory because every time she was back in her childhood bedroom, the ink stain on the wall—a little lighter each time, but always still there—prodded her to recall it. As did the remaining inkwell, so she rarely unwrapped it from its newer newspaper cocoon.  
  
Except on this day. This day, she has seen H.G. Wells become momentarily fascinated by a clickable ballpoint pen, watched her work out exactly how it functions, and observed her slight sniff of dismissal, or possibly disapproval, at the end of the process. Myka thinks that H.G. might miss things like inkwells, so she goes to her room after dinner and pulls her box of keepsakes from the back corner of her closet. The inkwell is at the bottom of the box; she has to scrabble through a layer of Secret Service memorabilia—all of which, she thinks, she should just throw away; what good is it doing her to keep it?—then a stratum of college (is that her diploma, rolled up in that cardboard tube?)—and finally, there is high school. She will throw that silly journal away, too, she decides. She’s sure it’s full of nothing but immature poems and pinings for things she can’t even remember how to want.  
  
The inkwell falls out of its wrapping as if it wants to, like it’s eager. Myka almost pauses to think about the young self it represents, but instead she propels herself off of the floor, into the hallway, halfway down the stairs. She hears Helena’s voice coming from the living room as a questioning murmur; someone, Claudia?, answers her back. Myka creeps the rest of the way down and peeks around the corner. It is in fact Claudia, who’s sitting next to H.G., jabbing a finger at something on the screen of the laptop that’s balanced precariously between them. “It’s the coolest thing in the _world_ , H.G.,” Claudia enthuses.  
  
“In the _world_?” Helena says back, her amusement clear.  
  
Myka sees Helena’s head lean forward at a particular angle easily read as “interest piqued.” Myka looks down at the inkwell in her hand. Helena already knows how inkwells work. There’s nothing to see, nothing to _learn_ here. Myka sneaks back upstairs.  
  
Some time later, she is sitting on the floor of her room, holding the inkwell, ready to wrap it and box it. She is her college-bound self again, just for this moment; that girl sat just this way, filled with nostalgia and regret for things done and undone.  
  
“Is that an inkwell?” a voice silks at her.  
  
Myka whips her head around to face the doorway, and the glass receptacle leaves her hands, a little nervous bobble-toss that makes it seem to float in front of her so that she has to give it gravity again by grabbing it inelegantly. “Um,” she says, because Helena is looking at her curiously.  
  
“Because I believe I had one rather like it. In the past.”  
  
Myka tries for diffidence in response: “Did you really? Well, maybe it was this one. It’s an antique.” _Oh, good one_ , is her immediate, sour thought. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”  
  
“It’s all right,” Helena says. She takes a step into the room. “May I?” At Myka’s nod, she walks forward and crouches beside her. She reaches for the inkwell, then stops and smiles. “Again, may I?”  
  
Myka nods again, and Helena’s hand captures the object. She raises it toward the light, scrutinizing it. “It’s actually far nicer than mine. Than any of mine,” she says. “I broke so many; it seemed an extravagance to care for their aesthetics.” The glass catches the light, bends it.  
  
“You don’t seem like you’d break things. Like that. I mean, you really did?”  
  
“Working out the details of time travel, et cetera, can be quite frustrating,” Helena says. Her eyes sparkle. She holds the inkwell up to her right eye as though it were a magnifying glass and squints through it at Myka. The glass has deformed over time; the darkness of her iris and the black of her pupil seem to grow and stretch, running together, filling the bottle.  
  
Myka wants to say something smooth like “I’m sure” or “how annoying,” but all she can do is sit and stare. For a moment she thinks that they will sit there forever, their eyes not quite meeting; then Helena says, “But I interrupted you.”  
  
Myka is bewildered. “You did?”  
  
“Well, I’d be quite surprised if you were spending your evening holding an inkwell, waiting for me to intrude.”  
  
Myka almost says, “then you’d be quite surprised,” but she catches herself just in time. Instead, she says, “Would you like it?” She means the inkwell, of course, but in one mortified second she realizes how it sounds.  
  
Helena smiles with that slight quirk of the lip, and Myka is sure she heard it that horrifying way. But then she clearly decides to take pity on Myka. “The inkwell, you mean,” she says gently.  
  
“Yes,” Myka breathes.  
  
Helena seems to consider the idea. “I think not,” she finally says.  
  
“Why not?” Myka asks. She can feel herself almost pouting.  
  
Helena chuckles, a gentle stream of a laugh. “You should know better than to entrust me with anything of yours that is breakable.”  
  
Then she is standing, a fluid unfolding of legs, torso, neck, and before Myka has a chance to react, she has slipped from the room and pulled the door to behind her.  
  
“Wait,” Myka manages to choke out, but Helena is gone.  
  
****  
A bolt of ivory silk rests next to Myka, who is perched uncomfortably on the luxe, low settee in the wedding-dress shop. No, not “shop”—“emporium.” Wedding dress emporium. A shop would be too pedestrian for these dresses. Tracy is in the fitting room with their mother, who is being taught how to lace up the back of Tracy’s gown, in preparation for the big day. Which is in six months, so Myka’s not quite sure why they’re here, and she’s particularly not quite sure why _she’s_ here. But she’d found herself in Denver for a rare weekend, more a twenty-four-hour layover, really, and Tracy wanted to “visit the dress,” all of which meant the planets had aligned, or something.  
  
She hears excited noises coming from the room. Wedding dresses. On the way to the emporium, Tracy had said over and over how she _knew_ this was her dress the moment she put it on; she just _knew_. Myka wonders if it’s the same feeling she herself got when she heard the words “Agent Bering” come out of her mouth for the first time—she had gone through so many majors, so many ideas about professions, so many possibilities. The differences between them had seemed almost insignificant, as if it wouldn’t have mattered if she had chosen physics or chemistry, biology or medicine. Economics or literature. Until she found the right thing, the thing she felt she had always already known, everything was just a vast, indistinct swath of unknowables.  
  
Like this silk, for example. Myka lifts a corner of the material and rolls it between her fingertips, testing it. It feels like physics, like if she had ever really taken the time to process those fluid dynamics equations, she could comprehend this cloth. Or biology, spiders and silkworms laboring to extrude fibers that could become gossamer… she glances around to make sure no one’s watching, then begins unwinding the fabric. She means only to let a yard or so loose, but the cylinder glides from her grasp and begins to roll across the showroom, unfurling increasingly quickly, easily, as if on a downhill slant; she is ungainly as she leaps for it, hurling her body after it, finally tackling it as, of course, her mother and Tracy at last emerge.  
  
Myka closes her eyes and listens to Tracy’s dress rustle as it comes to a stop next to where she lies on a cascade of silk. “It slipped out of my hands,” she says, without looking up.  
  
She is startled to hear Tracy say, “Your skin looks beautiful against it.”  
  
****  
Myka dreams of Pete driving her to Wisconsin, this time in an ambulance, from the back of which she watches Helena go about her everyday business. She knows something is wrong because Helena looks right at her with the first Emily Lake’s expression of pleasant nonrecognition. “She still doesn’t know,” Myka says to Pete. All he does is nod sagely and keep driving. How can she, from the rear of the ambulance, talk to him and see his reactions?  
  
When Myka’s alarm clock breaks her out of the dream—and the sound is an obscenity; she has never before needed an alarm to ensure that she would wake up at the time of her choosing—what she remembers most clearly is the blankness of Helena’s face. Rather, Emily Lake’s face. It’s funny, almost, how that name is always “Emily Lake,” almost run together as one word, “emilylake.” When Pete tried to talk to Myka about what had happened, he used an even longer word, “emilylakeinwisconsin.” Like Myka wouldn’t know who he was talking about otherwise. Or like she wouldn’t be able to handle hearing the letters “H.G.”  
  
Myka can handle it. Myka can sail through it all, and she determines that she will prove that to herself by going back to Wisconsin. That will make it _clear_ that she is able to continue on just fine regardless of whatever’s in the bucket the universe decides to empty on her this time.  
  
She steals two days: from her doctors, by telling each one that she has something scheduled with another; from the Warehouse, by pleading a need to “put everything on hold for a minute”; from Pete and Claudia and everyone else, by flat-out lying about where she’s going. She can’t bring herself to talk to Steve—because not only would he know that she’s lying; he’d understand and accept what she’s trying to do. And understanding and acceptance are the only things that could stop her.  
  
It takes Myka two flights to get from South Dakota to the appropriate airport in Wisconsin, where she rents a car. She drives to Boone and parks down the street from Helena’s forensic lab in the late afternoon. The sun is starting to set; Myka has to keep her sunglasses on not just to ensure that no one recognizes her but also to shield her eyes from the blinding rays that are streaming toward her at just the right angle. The glare is so profound that she almost misses Helena’s emergence from the building.  
  
Her materialization, as if from the light itself, is a tease, for Helena is not Helena; she is emilylake. She is still beautiful, of course: Myka would almost be satisfied to do nothing but gaze at the scape of her for days. Yet her spine is stiff; her gait does not flow with the grace Myka expects. But why should it? She moves for different reasons now.  
  
Myka has steeled herself against the idea that Helena will climb into a car driven by that man, but instead, Helena remains alone as she takes the driver’s side of a modest sedan that is parked a bit uncomfortably near Myka’s rented SUV. (This is Pete’s fault; she has found herself in the habit of requesting his preferred behemoths, even when she could and should be driving something that sips gas instead.) She is momentarily flooded with the wild hope that Helena no longer lives with that man and his child; she feels her blood pound in her ears as she follows Helena through the streets of the small town. The sense of possibility drains from her as it becomes clear that Helena is indeed heading for that house.  
  
Sure enough, Helena pulls into the driveway, then into the garage, and Myka can no longer see anything but lights shining through curtained windows. There is no view to the interior. She waits, though, just in case… but the lights are all off by eleven. Myka gives up and finds a hotel.  
  
She is back the next morning before sunup, watching and waiting. She follows Helena back to work at precisely 7:16. She follows her to a diner for lunch at 12:23; lunch lasts thirty-two minutes. Helena leaves work at 6:08. Myka is bored out of her mind, and when Helena once again drives into the garage, Myka almost heads back to the hotel. She hasn’t come anywhere close to getting what she came here for, not that she knows what that is, but she could use some sleep. She has to be at the airport early tomorrow morning for her flight. She sets down the binoculars through which she’s been watching the house and starts to turn the key in the ignition.  
  
Helena’s garage door begins to open.  
  
Myka tries not to react, because it could be something pedestrian, like that kid coming outside to play, or horrible, like Helena and that guy going out to dinner.  
  
It’s neither of those things. It’s Helena, alone in her car, backing out of the driveway and taking off down the street. Myka lets out a shallow breath and follows.  
  
As they drive, in their little two-car parade, Myka’s anticipation begins to build. What is Helena doing? Maybe this is the secret, the key to it all; maybe there is a real reason she is here, and Myka is about to discover it. The farther they go, the more convinced Myka becomes: this is why she had the dream, this is why she was moved to come here again, now.  
  
At last, Helena pulls into a parking lot. It is adjacent to a gray, concrete building that has the low-slung institutional look of an elementary school built in the 1970s. A banner strung across its façade reads “Boone Culinary Institute.”  
  
Myka does not know whether to laugh or cry.  
  
Emily Lake’s life is exactly what it appears to be; it is glass-smooth. Yet Myka now finds herself determined to see this day through. She waits in the parking lot for two and a half hours, musing on what might be happening in the “culinary institute.” It is a form of tedious torture, but she deserves it, for letting herself dream. “Class, today we’ll be making a soup that will squander the talents of H.G. Wells.” Helena will measure and pour ingredients. She will act as if she enjoys it, and for all Myka knows, emilylake will actually enjoy it.  
  
They drive back to the house, Myka still at her safe distance—though what difference it would make if Helena knew she was there, she can’t imagine anymore. In the driveway, Helena’s car stops one last time, waiting for the garage door to rise. Myka brings her binoculars to her face just in time to see Helena let her head rest against the back of the seat. She looks… empty.  
  
Now that she is down to it, Myka feels panic rise in her again. If she doesn’t do something, and quickly, Helena will disappear into that house, and Myka will not see her again, she knows. She _knows_. She can’t let this be the last sight; she casts about for something, anything, she can do; throw a rock, yell “fire,” drive the SUV at sixty miles an hour through that house’s front window? She sees her cell phone on the seat beside her. She grabs it, and it is so easy to navigate to Helena’s number—because she has done it a hundred, a thousand times since Helena called her, that awful morning at the bed and breakfast—and it is just as easy to send a text. Or more accurately, to send a non-text: it is blank. It could be written off as a glitch of some kind. But it could make Helena stop, just for a moment, and that is what Myka needs.  
  
She squints through the binoculars, sees Helena raise her head again. The garage door is open now, and she must be about to drive in—but then Helena freezes. Myka sees her movements turn jerky as she seizes what must be her phone, then seems to fling it away.  
  
Helena gets out of the car and turns to lean forward against it, her hands pressing the edge of the roof as if she wants to, as if she really could, overturn the thing. She pushes herself off with a force that carries her back into the yard, where she stands with her hands in front of her, clenching and unclenching her fingers into, out of, fists. After a moment, she turns around to face the street and looks it up and down, as if she’s… worried that a neighbor has seen her? It’s dark; no one is around. Aware that she’s being watched?  
  
Myka has plenty of surveillance experience. She knows well enough how to position herself invisibly far away, so that Helena has no way of seeing her. But she can see Helena. She can see her very clearly; the lenses of the binoculars are very powerful. She can see, with striking clarity, that Helena is crying. Not the eye-glistening that Myka has seen from her before, though; she is sobbing. Rivers course down her face.  
  
Behind the binoculars, Myka is stunned.  
  
She is stunned again when, as if in parodic response to Helena’s tears, the lawn sprinkler system starts up, showering Helena with an impressively large volume of water. Helena barely flinches. She stands, statue-still, and lets the water hit her, lets it run down her body. She doesn’t move as the oscillating head directs the stream away, away, away, away, then back, back, back, back.  
  
Myka is fixed by indecision. She wants nothing more than to go to Helena, to embrace her soaking body, to nuzzle her saturated hair. She knows, though, that if she makes such a move, there will be questions, the answers to which will include “cancer.” That word stops everything in its tracks—and Myka knows now that the Emily Lake charade _will_ come to an end, but there is a right way for that to happen, and that word is not it.  
  
The right words will come in time. Myka says them now, out loud, just to feel them leave her lips for the first time. “I love you,” she says. She has not spoken in an entire day, she realizes. As her voice restarts, it is rough, as if tumbling over rocks. “I love you,” she says again; it’s easier this time.  
  
Myka inhales deeply. When Emily Lake walks into that house, H.G. Wells is going to have to make up a story. Or she is going to have to tell the truth. Either way, emilylake’s continuity will be broken. Either way, Myka wins.

  
****  
“But what does it _do_?” asks six-year-old Myka.  
  
“It tells time,” her father says.  
  
But Myka has been going to school for a long time now. She knows perfectly well that _clocks_ tell time. This thing looks nothing like a clock; it’s just weird smooth slippery sand inside some glass. The glass is shaped like an infinity. She knows about infinity—that’s when things go on forever. “It can’t tell time,” she says flatly.  
  
Her father turns it on one end. “It takes a particular amount of time for the sand to fall to the other side,” he explains.  
  
The falling sand horrifies Myka. “Make it stop!” she tells him.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“I don’t want infinity! Make it stop!”  
  
“It’ll stop when it’s all gone. Then you turn it over and start again.”  
  
Myka feels a sensation that she will eventually come to understand is called “an anxiety attack” overtake her. “It’s infinity! Make it stop!” she begs her father. He laughs. She begins to pant erratically, then reaches out, almost blindly, and does the only thing imaginable in that moment: she knocks the thing on its side. The sand stops, settles. Myka can breathe again.

END


End file.
